1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of positioning a head attaching part of a flexure of a head suspension relative to a supporting part of a load beam of the head suspension, a method of manufacturing a half-finished head suspension, and a half-finished head suspension.
2. Description of Related Art
A head suspension supports a read/write head to write and read data to and from a hard disk in a hard disk drive. The head suspension includes a load beam and a flexure. The load beam applies load onto the read/write head at a front end thereof. The flexure is laid on and joined to the load beam, to support the flexure.
The flexure has a conductor pattern that is connected to the head. At a front end, the flexure has a tongue serving as a head attaching part on which pads (electrodes) of the conductor pattern are arranged. The tongue has a front face to which the head is attached and a back face that is in contact with and is supported with a dimple as a supporting part formed on the load beam.
In a hard disk drive, the head of the head suspension slightly floats from a hard disk when the hard disk is rotated at high speed, to write and read data to and from the hard disk. At this time, the head swings around the dimple, to stabilize the attitude of itself.
To surely stabilize the attitude, the head must precisely be positioned relative to the dimple. The requirement for the head positioning preciseness is becoming severer as requirements for higher speed, higher capacity hard disk drives are increasing.
To meet the requirements, JP2010-40116A discloses a technique of correctly positioning the tongue, i.e., the head attaching part of a flexure relative to the dimple of a load beam.
This related art forms a reference hole in each of the flexure and load beam and inserts a positioning pin into the reference holes. The reference hole on the flexure is defined with a conductor layer portion of the flexure. The conductor layer portion is formed together with a conductor pattern in the same layer.
The related art positions the flexure and load beam relative to each other with the use of the reference holes and positioning pin, thereby positioning the conductor pattern and dimple with respect to each other. With this, the related art correctly positions the tongue relative to the dimple in accordance with a head attaching position decided on the head attaching part based on positions of pads of the conductor pattern.
The related art, however, has a problem that the reference hole of the flexure defined with the conductor layer easily deforms because the conductor layer is made of soft material such as copper. If the reference hole deforms, it is impossible to precisely position the tongue with respect to the dimple.
In addition, the related art must prepare a clearance between the reference holes and the positioning pin and such a clearance deteriorates the positioning accuracy of the tongue with respect to the dimple.